The Unhappy Consciousness: The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Literature

344 Pages·1981·17.17 MB·English

by  Eugene F. Kaelin (auth.)

THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS
ANALECT A HUSSERLIANA
THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
VOLUME XIII
Editor:
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA
The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning,
Belmont, Mass.
EUGENE F. KAELIN
Dept. ofP hilosophy, Rorida State University, Tallahassee
THE UNHAPPY
CONSCIOUSNESS
THE POETIC PLIGHT OF SAMUEL BECKETT
An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Literature
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
DORDRECHT: HOLLAND / BOSTON: U.S.A.
LONDON: ENGLAND
Libruy of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kaelin, Eugene Francis, 1926-
The unhappy consciousness.
(Analecta Husserliana ; v. 13)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906- -Philosophy. 2.
Phenomenology and literature. I. Title. II. Series.
B3279.H94A129 vol. 13 [PR6003.E282Z5) 81-12137
ISBN-13: 978-94-009-8524-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-8522-3
001: 10.1007/978-94-009-8522-3
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Copyright © 1981 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1981
To My Parents,
Who Knew,
Without Having Read of It,
The Truth of Consciousness
THE THEME
LITERATURE AND INTERDISCIPLINARY PHENOMENOLOGY:
The Pessimism/Optimism controversy in the work ofS amuel Beckett as
viewed by Eugene Kaelin
Eugene Kaelin's book appears in the sequence of the research program: Inter
disciplinary Phenomenology and literature, which is being carried out by
The International Society for Phenomenology and Literature, and follows
the forthcoming Volume XII of the Analecta Husserliana series entitled The
Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature. Professor Kaelin plays an im
portant role in this research program and we are happy that he has entrusted
his book to us.
Proposing the philosophical program for our literature and interdisciplinary
phenomenology research, I have attempted to highlight the main perspectives
in which literature and philosophy meet.* The enigmatic situation of the
human being, the vicissitudes of his existence, his ever repeated efforts to
discover his "unique destiny" over against the common doom, present puzzl
ing issues by which both are haunted. To evoke, differentiate and show the
multiple variants of answers to these issues is the task of one, while to unravel
and to determine their ultimate factors in the Human Condition is that of the
other.
In some literary works the philosophical quest is intermingled with artistic
literary pursuit; in others, philosophical reflection serves as artistic means.
Yet, due to these common innermost concerns, even those literary works
which appear as devoid of philosophical thought call upon philosophy in
order to be appropriately appreciated.
Eugene Kaelin's philosophical analysis of Beckett's work shows that al
though on a primary analysis philosophical thought and literary artistry may
blend, it still needs philosophically enlightened criticism to perform - as if
counteracting philosophy's first impact - a secondary interpretation, so as to
bring the significance of this blend to its maturity.
* Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 'Poetica Nova: The Creative Crucibles of the Human
Condition and of Art / A Treatise on the Metaphysics of the Human Condition and of
Art,' Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XII, forthcoming.
vii
viii THE THEME
Samuel Beckett has visited upon the world one of the richest and most
awe-inspiring of contemporary literary oeuvres. His life's work includes poetry,
novels, short stories, plays, radio and television skits, a movie scenario - all
marked by a high degree of self-conscious artistry which reduces an abstract
thought to an electrifyingly concrete image, and the image to a pattern of
sound that gives it body. Indeed, in the same oeuvre there are plays without
words in which ideas are portrayed through bodily gesture, and fIlms that are
made to breathe in sight and sound. Never, in all this prodigious imaginative
creation, is an idea pursued for its own sake as summarizing for our insouciant
intellects the essence of our natural or social life-worlds, or the tragedy of
our humanly projected individual existences therein, or how it is with the
aesthete whose writing is performed in pain, and undertaken to relieve the
pain of living, or even how it is with those of us who have never created a
world or written a word the least pregnant with meaning. Ideas are for the
intellect; art is made to wring the elevated element from our Human Con
dition.
Professor Kaelin has not written on all of Beckett's works. He begins his
treatise with an overview of the criticism Beckett's art has already engendered:
some good, some bad, some merely irrelevant. What makes criticism first
relevant and then good is its fittingness to the corpus that has inspired it, its
analytical acuity and perceptual clarity, and, ultimately, its effect in creating
the desire to revisit the original artistic and creative mass. From the extant
criticism on Beckett's art, Kaelin has chosen a dominant theme: Beckett as
"philosophical" writer. What makes a literary artist philosophical? An attitude
of resignation? Or of ponderousness? A penchant for analysis? Or merely a
concern for the perennially unsolved problems of the human species? If so,
the literary artist is like any other man or woman: humble before the awfully
great, or prideful and a little pompous, as the case may be; too concerned
with the accuracy of one's own categories, and foolish enough to continue
stretching them to cover the imponderables of human existence, including
the joys a well-turned phrase may evoke in the jaded hearts of the all-knowing
but mysteriously unseeing cognoscenti.
The literary artist is philosophical to the degree that his works exhibit a
philosophical structure; such is Kaelin's thesis. The philosophy of a work does
not appear on that work's surface, nor in the literal meanings of the words
whose tokens appear on that surface, but only in the plots, if the idea is
metaphysical, or in the author's characterization, if moral. For this reason,
Professor Kaelin attempts to read through the surface of the works, through
the semantic constructions of the author's syntax, to whatever reality is
THE THEME ix
depicted within the stratum of "represented objectivities," to use the term of
Roman Ingarden, whether that is reality presented in a metaphysical or moral
perspective. And since literature has been produced that is philosophical in
this sense of the term - a genre of literature in which it is the literature and
not the author that is philosophical, Kaelin has devised a method for the
criticism of this particular genre of the literary art. We could call it "philoso
phical criticism," but he prefers the more specific label, "phenomenological
structuralism." It is a way in which anyone proceeds who reads the work and
then describes what appears therein, and which could therefore appear to any
attentive consciousness.
The model for such a method had already been hinted at in the criticism
of Beckett himself; the authors he criticized were Joyce and Proust. Such
writers are "philosophical," claimed Beckett, in that they used a philosophical
idea as a literary technique, merely as a convenience for giving structure to
their works of art. Behind Joyce there stood Dante and Bruno and Vico;
behind Proust, Schopenhauer and Bergson. This treatise attempts to gauge
the extent to which Beckett himself is a "philosophical" author in the sense
described; and behind him looms the shadows of a host of philosophers:
Descartes, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre, to name
only the most obvious.
The central question asked in pursuit of this method is not how this partic
ular work of our author seemingly expresses the absurdity of the Human
Condition, for that is at once a loaded and misguided question. The works
do not express absurdity at all; absurdity is sometimes used, however, to
express whatever it is the total work itself expresses. Misguided, in the same
vein, is the question whether these works express pessimism or optimism or
meliorism; for they express neither of the three. Beckett's vaunted "pessi
mism," like the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer Beckett has on occasion
used to structure his work, is also a technical convenience. Where he has
depicted the human being as completely caught up in the throes of inauthen
tic existence - either as living in the past in the flight from the present in
order to avoid the necessity of making a decision to produce a better future,
or surrendering one's own will to that of another, or merely monotonously
repeating an action that is no action because it lacks significance even to the
person whose spirit has become deadened by such a habit - others have
found the tragedy of our contemporary age; if so, it is a tragedy in search of
a theory, a Sophoclean phenomenon in search of an unknown Aristotle.
Aristotelian catharsis, we all recall, was developed for the humanity of
antiquity, and necessitated a protagonist better than the average man or
x THE THEME
woman, albeit flawed by a particular human weakness, and could for this
reason not fit the world inhabited by bums, weaklings, cowards, and the
moral degenerates we all can be. Beckett's are no flawed characters; as artistic
creations, they are characters perfected to produce the effect they do. Our
perception of their fates does not shunt off our feelings of pity and fear as
if into the atmosphere itself. Rather, it concentrates our feeling as if com
pressed into an ache in the center of our breasts.
Whether novelistic or dramatic, Beckett's characters are sublime. The more
they suffer, the less significant their lives, the more inauthentic their struggles
to relieve the hurt, the deeper into the mud their nameless essence is driven,
the greater is the tragic lift controlled by an encounter with the literary or
dramatic work which may thus be all the more authentic, as art, as the heroes
or antiheroes of that art are themselves inauthe,ntic as personalities. After all
these years, the play is still the thing, not the idea; the novel, and not our
reading of it, whose encounter produces the aesthetic effect.
For this reason, it is safer perhaps to aver that man's true nature is better
known, because better learned, through our encounters with works of art
than through any artist's particular vision of the truth of human nature. Such
indeed is the assumption Professor Kaelin asks us to make in order to follow
his account of Beckett's poetic plight. If you go along with his suggestion,
you will be led through the labyrinthine ways in the imagination of a con
summate artist.
Philosophically, that imagination has been variously shaped: from the
earlier points of view that are Cartesian, Berkeleyan, Schopenhaurean, we
move to the middle stages in which the Hegelian self-referring infinitude of
absolute mind gradually changes into the ultimate stages in which existentialist
themes dominate the literary and dramatic structures. And throughout, in
both the novels and the plays, there is Beckett's constant concern for getting
it right, for making the direct point indirectly, to show and not merely to tell.
Always the aesthete, he has approached his artistic zenith in accomplishing
the maximum effect with the minimum "natural" resources - a sight varying
from blinding light to utter darkness, each concealing the litter of our natural
environment, and constituting one variance interspersed with another: a field
of sound constituted by a baby's cry out of a stark silence and alternating
with an adult's sigh; the two sets of variances constitute a new phenomenology
of consciousness unfolding in less than a minute's exposure, yet experienced
as a single harmony of sound and visual sense.
In the later novels, as in many of the plays, the hero is the narrator. He
may be nameless because unnamable, a voice struggling to control other
THE THEME xi
voices, a ping, indeed; or he may be a groveler in the mud, or a personification
unhappily divided into two parts, separated only by the nothingness of time,
the one controlling the words, the other the music. But as always the puzzle
to be solved entails the harmony of the music with the words, the rhythm
with the image invoked. Indeed, it is in the novels of the creative voice and
in the plays raised to the second exponential degree, which Professor Kaelin
calls "dramaturgical ," that the author's purpose becomes most obvious:
showing how it is is perhaps the only way of relieving the pain of how it is,
to live as a human being.
Separated from oneself as from others and from others as from any rational
ideal, which Hegel calls "the Beyond," the literary consciousness is the un
happy consciousness per se, which, left to its own devices, may be allowed
to languish in the pain of its own separation from the world and from others,
or to assume the pain of its own self-deliverance, which is to create a reality
of significance to itself. At their highest, i.e. in the slough of their despond,
Beckett's literary and dramatic works illuminate in our every encounter with
them a tragedy for our modern times; and they do this by evincing the sub
limity of the human spirit.
Parts of this treatise were delivered at the second annual meeting of the
International Society for Phenomenology and Literature operating under the
aegis of the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and
Learning, with its headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts.
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA